My personal hypothesis is that all human preferences are transient preferences, produced as flashes of positive or negative affect towards some mental concept.

I like that. People do change preferences, a lot - there was that [not very accurate] quote saying (US Centric) along the lines of "If you under 25 and vote republic, you have no heart" "If you over 25 and vote liberal you have no brains"

The most difficult part of this is that people have ingrained beliefs and preferences that will make them unhappy if the other side is picked - rational or not, we cant pick preferences that make all people happy.

For example

Group1 prefers more taxes for social services and hates social injustice

Group2 hates higher taxes

So for Group1 to be happy the Tax_rate should be between 0.2 -> 0.4

but this makes Group2 unhappy as their preferred tax rate is between 0.05 -> 0.15

There is no value in tax_rate that makes all groups happy.

Even if this were solved with infiniate social services and zero tax rates the million other disparate preferences - whether rational or not would cause bigger issues (religeous | athiest, vi | emacs, etc)